OBJECTIVES: This study hypothesized that interpersonal workplace stressors involving sexual harassment and generalized workplace abuse are highly prevalent and significantly linked with mental health outcomes including symptomatic distress, the use and abuse of alcohol, and other drug use. METHODS: Employees in 4 university occupational groups (faculty, student, clerical, and service workers; n = 2492) were surveyed by means of a mailed self-report instrument. Cross-tabular and ordinary least squares and logistic regression analyses examined the prevalence of harassment and abuse and their association with mental health status. RESULTS: The data show high rates of harassment and abuse. Among faculty, females were subjected to higher rates; among clerical and service workers, males were subjected to higher rates. Male and female clerical and service workers experienced higher levels of particularly severe mistreatment. Generalized abuse was more prevalent than harassment for all groups. Both harassment and abuse were significantly linked to most mental health outcomes for men and women. CONCLUSIONS: Interpersonally abusive workplace dynamics constitute a significant public health problem that merits increased intervention and prevention strategies.

A wealth of evidence points to the positive outcomes experienced by immigrants who can speak the dominant language in a receiving country. But most scholarship treats language acquisition as a variable that affects labor market opportunities, whether conceptualized as human or social capital. We argue that analyzing language as a noneconomic resource that can flow through social networks is important not only for understanding immigrant integration, but also for gaining insight into the nature of social capital. Using qualitative data from recently resettled Burundian and Burmese refugees in Michigan, United States, we explore the experiences resulting from linguistic isolation at the household and community level, demonstrating how linguistically isolated refugees experience language as noneconomic social capital, in that language provides access to necessary information and constitutes an act of social power. Our research suggests that the linguistic resources of communities (both immigrant and receiving communities) are a key component of immigrant integration. Our study also points to the importance of thinking about language as a form of social capital that provides social power in addition to economic opportunities.

In approximately three decades, gender and migration scholarship has moved from a few studies that included women immigrants or included gender as a dichotomous variable to a burgeoning literature that has made significant contributions to understanding numerous aspects of the migration experience. The larger field of migration studies, however, has not yet fully embraced feminist migration analysis and theory. In this article, I describe the development of gender and migration research and its theoretical underpinnings. Afterward, I highlight the key contributions that feminist migration scholars have made to our knowledge of labor migration, migrant families and social networks, transnationalism and citizenship, sex trafficking, and sexuality. Considering these important contributions, I explore the reasons why feminist migration research still lies largely outside the mainstream of the broader field and how it might achieve better integration.

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This article addresses the role faith-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) play in refugee resettlement and how they are both different from and similar to secular resettlement NGOs. The author examines how faith-based and secular NGOs assist in the process of refugee resettlement in the United States. Data indicate that most faith-based resettlement NGOs are similar to secular NGOs in their practice but express their religiosity in their organizational rhetoric and networks. As a practice, religion is frequently tied to culture and, therefore, ethnic organizations engage in religious practice as a way of practicing that ethnicity’s culture.

The current US refugee resettlement system reflects the US government's agenda of having refugees acquire quick employment with low state welfare dependence and minimal fiscal and cultural disruption to the receiving communities. The nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) assisting refugees hold broader goals for refugees, including feeling a sense of belonging in the USA. These goals represent a framing of social citizenship rights for refugees, and how NGOs frame social citizenship varies depending upon the NGOs contractual relationship with the US welfare state. Using data from 57 in-depth interviews, I describe how resettlement and assistance NGOs currently frame social citizenship for refugees in relation to market citizenship, and how their relationship with the federal government shapes this framing. Findings illustrate the role of NGOs in creating a discursive space for expanding the social citizenship rights of refugees and the ways such framing is highly constrained by the definitions of belonging that emerge from market citizenship.

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